Ka Wai Ola - Office of Hawaiian Affairs, Volume 8, Number 12, 1 December 1991 — Educating tourists on history [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Educating tourists on history

By Christina Zarobe Assistant Editor Workshop participants eame from distant locations — Montana, South Africa, Australia, and western Canada — to leam about the complex lesson of interpreting conflict for tourists. The lively session on interpretation of race/culture conflict was one of dozens held during the Heritage Interpretation International's Third Global Congress last nionth in Waikiki. Glen Grant of Kapiolani Community College's Interpret Hawai'i Program, Daniel Martinez from the U.S.S. Arizona Memorial, and Victoria Kneubuhl of the Mission Houses Museum spoke to the group on the difficulties of educating tourists about controversial historic events. For the past three years, Kneubuhl and Grant have been performmg a living history tour about the overthrow of the Hawaiian nation in 1893. Kneubuhl takes the part of a royalist in support of the Hawaiian monarchy, while Grant plays an annexationist. "I feel the 19th century is really a century of pain and loss and collision of culture," said Kneubuhl, who is part-Hawaiian. "It educates non-Hawaiians and non-Polynesians to the struggles Hawaiians and the Polynesians had and also background to

the struggles they are having today." A sensitive time to reenact, Kneubuhl admitted there have been occasions when she became emotional while acting out her part. "It's really a hard tour to give as an interpretation and it doesn't seem to get easier as we keep doing it. "Because I am part-Hawaiian, those issues ... I have a personal stake in some of them," she said. Adamant about "authenticity," Grant said ' although he has left out certain references from historic passages that would be considered racist today, the language and ideas ean still be offensive. continued page 4

Glen Grant

Victoria Kneubuhl

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Educating tourists

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"You have got to build into the program the perspective that created those countervailing opinions," he explained. Kneubuhl pointed out that visitors should be "prepared" for what they are about to watch. "It's not just events but attitudes that shaped history." Daniel Martinez works for the National Park Service at the U.S.S. Arizona Memonal. Before coming to Pearl Harbor, heinterpretedfor visitors at the controversial Custer Battlefield National Monument. "You must be sensitive to what you are interpreting. There is nothing 1 ean say that is not interpreted by one individual or another as controversial," he said. "You have to be open to listening to two people's points of view and be able to present that." "And that is difficult to do at Pearl Harbor — that is sacred ground." Among the suggestions Martinez offered the group was to designate a person to handle press inquiries, employ ethnic groups who have cultural ties to the site and know the issues involved with the site. He also recommended that staff at the site be able to meet as a group to discuss problems or concerns as a way of avoiding "burnout." One member of the audience from the National Park Service spoke about an already hotly debated issue. "We've got a wild year ahead of us," he said, adding that he is working on the commemoration of Columbus discovering Amenea.